Developers: How often is too often?

[techieMoe]

I'm a fan of a particular piece of open-source software that I use to manage my collection of eBooks, Calibre. One thing that highly annoys me, however, is the update schedule for this program. It seems to me that every time I open it (which is about every other day) the program tells me it's out of date and there's a new release.

Sure, I can just ignore these things and only update when there's a major point update (most of these are minor .X.X releases), but why do the maintainers find it necessary to push out a full release for every minor bug fix? Why not collect them and (at most) do a once-a-week or once-every-2-weeks release? We're not talking about a piece of banking software here that's going to cause me to lose money if some niggling bug isn't fixed today.

What are your opinions on this?

[Segfault]

Methinks this maintainer is really active, as is the developer. Not a bad thing, IMO. An active maintainer is better than lazy one.

[GNU-Fan]

I know this experience from NoScript too. In former times, they would ask for an update every day or so. But it has become better since version 2.0.

As I install most software through repositories now, I don't suffer from it very much. I just do a system update once in a week. Let the distro maintainer sort 'em out

[techieMoe]

Methinks this maintainer is really active, as is the developer. Not a bad thing, IMO. An active maintainer is better than lazy one.

Oh, I understand. I'm not necessarily complaining that it's being actively maintained. My question is about his policy with updates. Currently, this is what happens:

• You launch the program and a dialog pops up telling you there's a new version. You have the option to navigate to the download/release notes page.
• If you choose to upgrade you download a new installer.
• If you do an upgrade, the installer takes twice to three times as long as a clean install, thus it's just easier to uninstall first.
• Wash, rinse, repeat about every 2 days.

It gets old. Perhaps if there were a mechanism to download a delta update and install it in the background, or something. I'm just brainstorming here.

[Segfault]

Yea ... this is why rsync, cvs, svn ... git were invented.
I do not have it installed. They should have an option not to remind you on daily basis.
This is kind of tough question, we certainly do not want to discourage the development ...

[minthaka]

I think, the more stable a program becomes, the less frequent are the updates, this is kind of rule. When I weren't a developer, I thought twice a year is a good number of updates. When my app was in its early stages, I did updates nearly every week. Now: once in two month.

[Roxoff]

Right, everyone... All join in with the mantra...

"Release early, release often"

[hazel]

I think, the more stable a program becomes, the less frequent are the updates, this is kind of rule.

I'm surprised at the number of updates I get in Crux for things like sudo - I mean absolutely basic utilities. Surely there can't be any security holes in these programs after decades of use? And they're not the kind of things you add extra functionality to.

[twoHats]

I really dislike this pattern with updates being either quick or calendar driven (Ubuntu). Programs should be updated when the fix is ready and thoroughly tested. If the fix is small, it can be saved for a more meaningful update. This concept that software maintenance is a race, either with a calendar or with ourselves, is begging for trouble.

Of course, all this is relevant only to programs of more than a few hundred lines of code.